Blogging with Darkness.com isn’t as difficult as you might imagine.  The trick is just knowing where to start.  Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, it’s pretty simple.  Most of our new members with no prior experience have already figured it out after spending just a short time with it.  Even Raver!

WordPress is the platform we’re using, with a main plugin called BuddyPress that provides us with the social networking features in the back-end.  If you wanted to do your own browsing around to see what you can do with WordPress, a good place to start is the Codex.

New Users should probably start here:  First Steps with WordPress
http://codex.wordpress.org/First_Steps_With_WordPress

What would I blog about?
The Codex will be useful for a lot of things, but another important thing to consider is why will you be blogging in the first place?  As a Darkness.com member, the ideal candidate for using the Darkness Blogs will be anyone that posts their own poetry or fiction or member pics and artwork.  The blog system is much better than the forum for all of these.  It’s fairly convenient.  It’s easy.  Most importantly, you have all the control over your content as well as anyone that comments on your posts (topics).  If someone is being rude or making you uncomfortable with a comment, you can just delete it.  If you have a change of heart and one of your entries should be removed, you can do that yourself.  Need to edit something or fix it, several weeks later?  Again, you’re the Admin.  You make the calls.  The only disadvantage during the early beta stage is getting visitors.  That should work itself out later once the Blogs are actually linked from the forum, chat, etc…

Reminder:  During the beta stages it’s important not to get too attached to the blogs as-is, but especially to a specific plug or theme.  It’s a time consuming process to test, and audit each of these for anything that may cause problems later.  Backup your own posts or save them somewhere outside the blogs.